Читать книгу The Fear Merchants - Brant House - Страница 4

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BATES spoke hoarsely, bloodless lips close to Peaselee's ear. "Can't leave by the door or windows. Cops would get us."

Peaselee abruptly drew the detective toward the north side of the room. Another chamber led off here. There was no glow of bursting sprinkler pipes in evidence as yet. But to reach it, he and the others had to run a gauntlet of savage flame. It singed their clothing as they swept by, it reached curling fingers at their flesh. They plunged on into the unlighted chamber, stopped.

Peaselee's light swung up. There was no sprinkler outlet visible. The room was a storage chamber for heavy machinery. There was no window either, only a blank brick wall straight ahead. This lay against the side of the warehouse they had left ten minutes ago.

No window, and the heat of the flames behind them was increasing every second. Escape by the exits was cut off. They were imprisoned by a flaming barrier, sealed in this ventless chamber till more flame entered and snuffed out their lives in a torrent of molten steel.

Bates began swearing, hoarsely, monotonously, his red-rimmed eyes darting about. One of the detectives with him turned back toward the flames. Peaselee stopped him with a quiet command.

Uncomprehending, but startled into submission by this clear order in the face of raging tumult, Bates and his men stood still.

Peaselee ran straight forward toward the blank brick wall. When he neared it, he took something from an inner pocket. It was a small object, shaped like a packet of cigarettes. There was a tiny lever at one end, a sharp metal point set solidly in the black case.

He placed the case against the bricks three feet from the floor. He jabbed the metal point into a crack in the plaster. It stayed there firmly. Then Peaselee pressed the lever down.

A faint sputtering like an electric spark came from within the box. Peaselee turned and dashed back toward the spot where he had left the others. He pulled them down behind a piece of heavy machinery. Their blank faces showed that they did not understand.

Before they could even question him, a tremendous explosion shook the room. The floor seemed to rise and quiver. Plaster and bits of bricks whistled above their heads. Dust filled the air in stifling clouds. Deafening echoes sounded.

Peaselee leaped up as quickly as he had crouched. His flash, spraying forward through the murk, played over a jagged hole in the wall. He had set a bomb, and it had blown straight through the bricks and plaster with the force of a giant battering—ram.

Bates suddenly turned and stared at the man called Peaselee. There was respect and awe on the big detective's square-cut face. His belligerent manner had entirely left him. His voice came hoarsely. "Got it now. Only one man I know of could have pulled a stunt like that. Only one man! You're him! You're—Secret Agent X."

There was a moment's silence, broken only by the hiss of the flames outside, and the men's deep breathing. Then "Peaselee" nodded. He pointed to the hole in the wall. "Follow me!"*

[* AUTHOR'S NOTE: Followers of the Secret Agent's published chronicles know that the Man of a Thousand faces assumes many strange disguises. In his grim work as an undercover battler of crime, his genius at impersonation is his ace in the hole. Even his few closest intimates never know how he may appear. And even they do not know his true identity for his real face has never been revealed. He is a man of mystery, and a daring adventurer along the dark and bloody trails of crime.]

They did so, obeying silently, quickly, like well-trained automata. They knew they were in the presence of a master manhunter whose slightest word was a command. They realized that the shabby, gray-haired figure ahead of them had saved their lives. They slipped through the wall like shadows. They left the scorching, seething death of the flames behind. Then suddenly they paused.

Shouts and footsteps sounded down the long corridor directly in front. The police had entered the warehouse. The threat of discovery and capture was imminent again.

Secret Agent X spoke a swift command. "Head toward the back of the building. Leave by a window. Quick!"

"And you, chief," Harvey Bates said firmly.

"I'll hold off the cops."

THE flashing, compelling light of authority gleamed in the Agent's dark eyes.

Bates grunted a word of agreement. Then they sped off at right angles, away from the menace of the oncoming police.

When they had left, the Secret Agent leaped to a high pile of old boxes at the hallway's side. He climbed them agilely, reached a steel bracing girder over the floor. He walked along this, stood poised above the direct center of the corridor where the police must pass.

They came on, guns gleaming, flashlights bobbing in their hands. There were only two of them he saw, but they had apparently glimpsed Harvey Bates and his men and had heard their voices. One of the bluecoats crashed three quick shots along the hall. Bullets ricocheted, whined. The pungent smell of cordite rose to the Agent's nostrils. He waited, crouching, every muscle tense. They were only ten feet away, five feet. They were directly under him now.

He dropped like a panther plummeting from a limb on unsuspecting quarry. Yet he was careful not to injure the blue-coated men. He merely knocked them off their feet, sent their guns spinning, made their flashlights crash.

Cursing, clawing, they went down in a heap beneath his outstretched arms and body. They struck with furious fists at this human whirlwind who had dropped apparently from the sky.

X untangled himself in an instant, backed away. He turned and raced forward along the way the police had come. He heard them behind him, searching frantically for their guns.

One located his weapon when the Agent had taken fifty strides. But the cop's flashlight was broken and the corridor was dark. The bullets that the policeman sent after X screamed harmlessly by. He ran on, reached the open door of the warehouse, plunged quickly through it—and he knew that Bates and his operatives were also safe.

But he made no attempt to join them. Instead, he crossed a rear yard running, vaulted a fence. For a moment he crouched in utter darkness. And his hands, lifting, did strange things to his face.

He drew off the gray toupee of "Peaselee," revealing a sandy one beneath it. He made deft changes in the plastic material covering his skin. He erased the lines of age, rounded the features. He touched pigment, taken from a tiny vial, here and there to his flesh. Lastly he peeled off the ragged garments that clothed him, exposing a trim business suit below.

He whipped a cloth cap over his head, stepped cautiously into a side street, a different person. Even if Bates should meet him face to face there would be no chance of recognition. The Man of a Thousand Faces had assumed another role.

Outside, along the wide avenue at the end of the street, sirens rose in a screaming tumult. Already a half dozen alarms had been turned in. Fire engines and police radio cruisers were converging on this festering spot of incendiary crime.

THE AGENT legged it for the avenue, turned right and saw the light of the burning factory lifting evilly into the sky. The windows had become oblongs of shimmering light. Some had burst outward, shattering glass into the street. Bright tongues of flame were shooting up. The whole great building was like a roaring furnace with every draft turned on.

The police cordon around it still held, and reserves were hastily coming up. They were stringing fire lines across the entire block. The curious crowds, increasing in size every instant, were being held at bay. Only the uniformed men, police and fire-fighters in their helmets and long black coats, were allowed inside.

X saw the first streams of water pumped on the factory. He saw the hissing drops disappear in dense clouds of steam, seeming only to add to the heat of the flames. He saw the futility of such a method of battle. Evidently the firemen saw it, too.

They made way suddenly for a huge red truck that came thundering up. It was packed, not with hose, but with gleaming tanks of chemicals under pressure. The Agent recognized some of the latest fire-fighting equipment. Great metal flasks of carbon dioxide, the gas that can smother flames in ships' holds and in blazing cellars.

Firemen, daring the terrific heat, ran pipes from the truck to the lower windows of the factory. An engine throbbed into life. Pumps sucked the gas from the tanks, forced it in screaming jets into the building. Under its spreading blanket even the chemical-fed fury of the flames within began to abate. One chemical was battling another in this startling war of science.

As the heat in the lower floors began to show signs of subsiding, firemen thrust ladders against the factory's walls. They inserted new pipes of the stifling gas into the windows of the floors above. These seeming pigmies in their helmet hats were slowly conquering the mighty giant of flame. The Agent knew the reason. The arsonist terror in the past few days had spread. There had been other purposely set fires. The truck had been held ready, its equipment augmented, waiting for another emergency call. Now it was proving its usefulness.

He started suddenly, turning his gaze upward as a sound drifted down from the sky. Mist, red as the flame below it, swirled above the burning factory. Out of this mist, eerie and sinister, came the hum of an airplane's motor. It throbbed like the drone of a giant bee, poised above hell's chimney. And in an instant the Agent saw the plane itself.

A darting will-o'-the-wisp of black and yellow swooped down out of the night. A small, fast ship with bands around its fuselage, looking for all the world like a curious wasp drawn by the fire below, circled close in the heat that seemed to reach for its wings. The pilot appeared mad to risk such perilous currents. The small plane bucked and quivered in the eddying drafts. It banked, turned, and came lower still—and the Agent sensed something sinister in its strange maneuvers. It was a winged wasp of death bound on some evil mission.

Police and firemen on the pavement saw it. Eyes in the dense crowd outside the fire lines watched its actions in straining silence. It banked once more, and came down till its black wings almost touched the house-tops—till a puff of heat made its striped fuselage roll like a cask at sea. And in that instant the gloved hand of the lone pilot moved out from the small plane's side.

X caught a quick glimpse of something dropping, small objects round and hard as walnuts. They fell toward the side of the factory where the fire-men were fighting the blaze with their chemical gas. And where they fell men screamed and staggered. Above the roar of the flames, above the drone of the plane's motor and the hissing gas, came a shrill sound of human torment.

The Agent saw firemen clutch at their faces wildly. He saw two tumble from a high ladder and pitch head-long into the street to their deaths. He saw others run away from their posts like men gone suddenly mad.

Chilled with horror, he burst forward through the stunned and gaping crowd. He tore through the fire lines beyond. No one tried to stop him. The police stood frozen with wonder at their posts. Firemen outside the radius of the nutlike missiles were running toward their comrades.

X caught sight of the features of one of the wildly clawing forms. The man had fallen to his knees. He had torn his coat and helmet off. His face was a bloated mass of tortured flesh, swollen to twice its normal size. His arms and legs looked as though he'd been stricken suddenly with elephantiasis. His lips and throat had swelled till his anguished screams had been choked off. As the Agent neared him he fell backwards writhing, then lay unmoving, a puffed and ghastly corpse.